Having Issues: Secret World Issue Two Delayed

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When we last peeked in on The Secret World, it was on the up and up. Rocket launchers and surgery were right around the corner, and – and in spite of that sentence sounding like some kind of homicidal plastic surgeon super villain trap – it was quite an exciting time. But things have changed a bit since then – mainly, things of the layoff variety. And with some reports saying that up-to-half of Funcom’s employees have gone the way of Kingsmouth residents (that is to say they disappeared – not that they turned into wildly gyrating fish monsters), it’s not too surprising that the remaining staffers would need a bit of extra time to get things back in working order.

Originally set to launch on August 29th, Issue Two – titled “Digging Deeper” – is now coming out on September 11th. Here’s Funcom’s stance on the matter:

“As you may know, this week has been a challenging one for everyone at Funcom. We initiated a process of reducing costs after the launch of The Secret World and this has naturally affected the production schedule as we work on readjusting the team and our internal development processes.”

“We will also continue to push out regular content like announced before. This small delay is merely due to the re-organization and assessment of processes that has been initiated. We are working hard to get back on track as soon as possible.”

Even so, I can’t help but have my doubts about that last point. If Funcom really has lost a major chunk of its staff, I imagine it’ll be pretty difficult to churn out monthly content of the same scope it was planning previously. Granted, Funcom has multiple offices, so it’s entirely possible that most of Secret World’s team dodged the bullet while the company took bigger hits in other places.

While I doubt I’ll receive an answer, I’ve nonetheless mailed Funcom about that particular sticking point. Regardless, here’s hoping for the best. The Secret World is clearly a labor of love and – in a few areas – fundamentally different from anything else on the market. If it can’t succeed in at least some small, consistent way, then… well, I suppose there’s always free-to-play. But I have no idea how that’d impact the monthly story content, and without that, I’m not sure TSW could really stand out from the rest of the pack for long.

63 Comments

I have enough of this bullshit, btw. “When this is going to fail?”, “When this is going to be free to play?” I just don’t get the hate that this game generates.

Why would be that good for you if SW failed? You know, there are players, like myself, who are enjoying this game VERY MUCH. I like the story, the characters, the atmosphere. The combat is – even if it’s not the best part of the game – satisfying for me.

If you don’t like the combat, fine. If it’s not your kind of game, that’s OK. There are thousands of other games you could play. Go, and enjoy a game that YOU like.

Why are you equating “when is it going to fail” to “when is it going free to play” ? Why are you assuming that the latter statement is due to or an expression of “hate” on this game ?

I played this one on the free weekend, it is fine and not that bad at all. However, I will be damned if I can justify a subscription based payment model for this game, or any other game nowadays for that matter. So I for one would love to see this go free to play. Plus maybe just maybe all those financial problems that they are having are an indication of just how bad of a payment model they picked for their game.

Obviously, if they just slap F2P in front of the title and continue business as usual it probably going to fail. They have to be smart about it if they are hoping to salvage this game somehow but hope is not yet lost. On the other hand, players shouldn’t expect that they are going to keep getting big “monthly” updates if this goes F2P. Probably smaller one or not as frequent. Still a fair sacrifice I think.

As much as I want to like this game, the recent layoff announcement to me is already the death knell. If it goes F2P kiss any future content updates goodbye: the remaining staff will be 100% focused on churning out outfits and other cash shop items to try and stay afloat. The game system itself is pretty revolutionary – I like it, I love the setting. But it’s definitely got a lack of polish and a number of bugs persisting, and a lack of variety in the endgame that’s going to chase players off quickly.

I didn’t so much have a negative response to TSW (free weekend) as I did a not-$15-a-month one. So I’m at least somewhat looking forward to F2P, not hoping to be able to keep shitting on it. If continuing to be subscription-based helps those who are really liking the game to get more out of it, I’m all for that. I’ve got other things to play. I can wait.

So, you just want the game for free? Based on the amount of whining and bitching in every major MMO that went F2P from players that its “Too restrictive” thats exactly what the majority want. Its fine if thats what people want, but don’t expect anything other than what you get – Cashgrabs in every way you turn, because like it or not, MMO’s are costly affairs and the employees needs to be paid like everyone else.

Guild Wars 2 would like to have a word with you. I’m tired of apologists saying “omg there is now way to have a free to play mmo without it sucking!” Paying retail plus a $15 subscription fee is completely outdated and unless you have the best mmo on the planet it’s not going to work. Even SW:TOR, one of the most hyped and anticipated mmo’s in a good long while is dying and is switching to free to play. If SW:TOR couldn’t pull it off, there is no way Secret World has a chance to. Even if some people don’t think the game is bad, it’s certainly not the greatest mmo around and tons of people feel the same way.

Plus, if it went free to play, do you realize how much that would improve population? More people in a Massively Multiplayer game is always a good thing so if going free to play insures the game has a thriving community I don’t get the negative response to free to play.

Guild Wars 2 has the right business model. Charge retail price and then no subscription. Have some items that aren’t pay to win in a cash shop that you can earn currency for in game without paying money if you so choose.

If you don’t support the game in the first place, then i would feel you wouldn’t be bothered then to maybe use the 3 (or 5 day) free trial they set up, that lets you EARN MONEY FOR THE IN GAME CASH SHOP and all. You know, maybe using the trial and then seeing if its worth the sub, thus keeping the content up in quality due to them having the budget to do so. :)

f2p is not “free”. Or were you under the impression EA and the other entities cashing in on it were suddenly overwhelmed by the spirit of good cheer? 3/10 effort, throw in some “ENTITLEMENT” for good measure.

“MMO’s are costly affairs and the employees needs to be paid like everyone else.”

I don’t care what it costs the developer, I care – as a player – whether or not the money I put into it is worth the content and experience I get out. So far, no MMO I’ve played has been worth even the money I paid for it at retail, let alone monthly subs. I’m sure it would cost quite a bit if Funcom gave $10,000 to charity every time a player levels up, but that doesn’t make me any more inclined to pay for a bad game.

“If you don’t support the game in the first place, then i would feel you wouldn’t be bothered then to maybe use the 3 (or 5 day) free trial they set up”

No idea what twisted point you’re trying to make here…I’m not interested buying and paying for a game because it sounds like a mediocre mmo from a long line of mediocre mmos, therefore…there’s no point making a trial version for people like me to sample? I guess?

Anyway I wasn’t aware of the three-day trial, only the intermittent “free weekends”. I might try it out if that’s all above board, though my expectations are abysmally low.

I’ll just say this: as an MMO with retail price and monthly fees, I have zero interest in TSW.

As a boxed game with paid DLC updates, I’d be intrigued and possibly would buy it. Honestly TSW fits the episodic DLC model perfectly. Buying the base game nets you the entire game as it was on launch and further content is a few dollars a piece, depending on scope. Lets players cherry pick the content they like, lets Funcom produce as much stuff as the community is able to pay for, lets people play at their own pace… What is there not to like?

Let the monthly sub model die already. There are many other methods which are better for players and developers.

F2P is not about failing. Some games that have gone free to play (like D&D and LOTRO) have increased their revenues three-fold. Since TSW has such a tiny playerbase now, I have no doubt they are scrambling to convert it to F2P. They need players, fast. That might even be why this update is delayed: too many people on the F2P conversion. You should WANT it to be F2P if you care about it succeeding.

Would it make you happier if I chimed in with “I don’t care if it goes free to play because my free weekend (demo) experience with it convinced me I don’t ever want to play it again.” ? This is my actual opinion, but I wouldn’t have commented except prompted by this.

I mean, I think the people looking for f2play are interested, just not with the deal as previously presented.

I’ve enjoyed the game. It has a lot of potential, but it’s a bit to repetitive for me to stick around full time and I cancelled my subscription last week. I would love to dip in and out of this as FTP, and the game is clearly set up with a mind to that model.

A monthly sub is just too much when there are so many other games to play. At least when it goes FTP the game will make a nice occasional break from GW2 and the couple of hundred indies I’m being picking up in bundles I haven’t yet got around to playing.

Monthly subs are a dying breed, and rightly so. It’s an ‘all you can eat’ deal when most people only have time for take away.

With FTP model SW wouldn’t get (quality) future updates. And that would be the biggest problem. This game lives and dies on its quests, characters. It’s not just an other grinding MMO where you get 20 more item in a form of patch/update.

There are several FTP MMOs getting good quality regular updates. Whether income derives from microtransactions or monthly subs is irrelevant. The experience of MMORPGs going FTP has generally been that the games actually increase their income – look at LOTRO, which tripled its income after going FTP, and is scheduled to release a massive quality expansion this October.

I was going to say, the LOTRO F2P model is a good example of what I think other MMO’s should be shooting for in that regard. It still allows those who want to pay a monthly sub and receive nearly everything to do so, and a F2P model for those who just want to dip in and pay for little bits and pieces as and when they want. And LOTRO is still going well and bringing out big updates and expansions. So F2P doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. I think in general those that start as F2P from the off tend to be more about monetization than those that simply turn to it as a way to keep existing. It seems to have worked pretty well for D&D online and LOTRO amongst others.

What are you talking about? If a company earns money via microtransactions, they can afford the updates. What difference does it make where the money comes from? If you can generate money with microtransactions, a subscription fee is irrelevant. That’s a pretty poor argument against free to play. People keep wanting to justify how they are tossing a lot of money into a sinking ship.

I’m sure people go into it expecting that to be the case. In the visual effects industry, this is how it works, and people just get shuffled around between whichever company happens to have all the work. (Or just take a long holiday).

Probably because experience is experience. If you can put down that you have experience in making this type of game, that type of game and t’other one, then you’re showing you have more experience, potentially a wider range of skills & are more employable, even if the games did not do well, than, say, this chap who only worked on such-and-such game or is fresh out of College/University.

It doesn’t matter how much they like or dislike the project they’re working on, it’s a paid job which will hopefully be steady employment until the end of the project and, hopefully, afterwards on new projects, but if not they can then go on to another employer and say “I was an artist on the BLEH game which came out this year, where I did this, this and this.” Better than going to an employer and saying “I am a games artist. Have I worked on a game? Well, no, because; a) fresh out of college/uni & no experience in the industry or b) I didn’t like their projects so I decided not to work for them.” You have to do a lot of bullshitting to show potential employers that you will be an enthusiastic, positive & eager employee.

“While shuffling from company to company might be fun for a while, it’s not exactly the best way to achieve a stable personal economy.”
If you want stability, then you don’t work in the game industry, period. MMO companies are likely to lay you off, it’s true, but so are every other sort of game company (except perhaps social games right now). Most games are commercial failures, assuming they even get finished. Having spent some time working on MMOs, I never expected that the company would even be around long enough for the game to get released. The only MMO company I worked for that lasted long enough to get the game out laid everyone off the next week. As a colleague with more experience working in MMOs put it on day one of the job, “I know this company is doomed. I just need a paycheck.” That’s the attitude you have to adopt.

@rapier17: It’s true, and the game industry largely hires based on the number of shipped games you have on your resumé. There’s a high incentive to stick around to the bitter end.

“There’s no money in single-player, we need to make subscription MMOs”
“There’s no money in subscription MMOs, we need to make free-to-play”
“There’s no money in free-to-play, we need to make single-player”

The money clumps around the most heavily marketed products, generally, in a sort of power-law distribution. Most games lose money. Everyone who’s spending money developing cash-losers is hoping to be one of the big hits. If you spread the cash across all the games being made, it wouldn’t begin to add up to profits for all. (Heck, these days even some of the biggest hits aren’t making that much money once you factor in the enormous development and marketing costs.) So on the whole and on average, not a lot of money.

Problem is, that’s pretty much all AAA games. The point of subscription MMOs is actually to reduce risk by having an extra, continuous revenue stream. The risk is no worse than for a single player games, but the failures of MMOs are more obvious; the studio that made a poor-selling single player game can collapse quietly, the game already in markets.

The game looks intriguing and from the little time that I was able to spend over the free weekend on it I’d quite happily drop a one-time payment. The idea of paying a monthly fee for a game has never appealed and I’m afraid it didn’t change with this.
It’s always sad to hear about layoffs though and I hope the affected find work soon.

The thing you have to understand is, most creative endeavors fail to make money. Most authors don’t make a living writing books, it’s essentially a hobby. Most films don’t make a profit from ticket sales (but they have secondary revenue streams that help). Back when music was sold on various disks, bands, even on “major labels,” almost never made money off recordings. The game industry is no different. You have management trying to reduce risk and maximize profits just to keep the company alive, but there’s a lot of luck involved in guessing whether something will sell sufficiently well at a given point in time. (And it’s a balancing act, as reduction of risk means fewer creative risks, so a smaller chance of creating a surprise hit.)

All very well argued. To add to the points made rather than make any particular point of my own… The big difference between computer game development and many other creative industries is the lack of secondary revenue streams, so computer gaming is handicapped to an extent. I would also add that in the movie industry, AAA is often a better bet for avoiding loss. People seem willing to pay for crap so long as it’s good looking crap. Very few AAA movies end up losing money, even with a 10% “fresh” score. From what can see, the computer development industry isn’t that different. Most of the post development layoffs I’ve seen appear to be more about the games making insufficient revenue to fund the next project within the first three months of release, rather than losing money per-se. Most AAA titles will have plenty of opportunities to payback the investment over 15 years of Steam sales and/or retrofitting the MMO for FTP.

There is a problem in the industry with companies trying to eke every last bit of work they can out of their employees before the money runs out, which means they often end up having to lay everyone off either as soon as development is finished (as with Just Cause 2) or a couple months after release, when they don’t get the revenue they expected (as with APB).
Back when games were exclusively sold in brick and mortar stores, most games were lucky to get a few weeks worth of sales (and after that, forget it). Now there is a “long tail,” but those first few months of sales make up the vast majority of revenue for most games (as prices and sales numbers drop rapidly). And the thing is, altogether most AAA titles need at least a million sales to break even, but they get, on average, 500,000. Since most studios don’t last 5 years, much less 15, it hardly matters to them what their sales are at that point (though their publishers are happy). Non AAA games, lacking the marketing budget, are going to get orders of magnitude fewer sales, which makes it hard to survive. Tiny indie games have a poor success rate as well, but a low cost of failure softens the blow. Which is why social games are big right now – they don’t need much to get by, and a constant revenue stream from even a modestly successful game can keep a company going. That’s not really possible at the other levels of the industry.

It’s a shame that the MMO industry ahs reached the point were people are hoping for each new MMO to fail … but on the other hand they only really have themselves to blame. (not funcom specifically).

Without having played it, it seems that a free game with paid monthly updates would be a much more suitable business model for this kind of game. Episodic gaming, if you will.

Heck, they even seem to be theming their monthly updates like monthly comics, so why not price them like that. A new $4 issue every month, that people can choose to buy or skip. then release omnibus editions every year.

They should have gone with a $4 introductory issue price as well… i wonder if they’d have made a lot more money.

I played TSW, and enjoyed it for about 3 weeks. I don’t hate it, and am unhappy about talented people losing their jobs, but have to admit I’m a little glad about the failures in the abstract, because MMO gameplay isn’t evolving fast enough. It seems like only the jolt of many deaths will drive things forward.

The striking thing is how TSW can be touted as something different when it changes so little from the stale formula.

Of course many project deaths may also just shut down all efforts in this area. That would be a shame. But I’m not about to support the status quo mediocrity just to hedge against that possibility.

Thing is, in it’s own way, TSW has been helping to evolve MMO gameplay through it’s (somewhat ropey) stealth and (brilliant) investigation quests. Having to really think your way through the quests is incredibly refreshing and what drew me to the game in the first place. I get horrifically bored of doing “Kill X enemies, now XX enemies and lastly XXX enemies and the big boss guy.” At least the Stealth quests were more about avoiding enemies and thinking your way through them or with the investigation ones they tax your mind in all manner of ways with a vast array of different subjects coming up through them – for example I had an interesting hour learning about various medicines & illnesses and applying the correct medicine to each illness (there were 4) to solve one part of one quest and in another I had to work out that ISBN codes for books were the way to solve another puzzle.

I’m not saying the game is revolutionary, not by a long chalk, but it tries to do some things differently and who knows? In time they might try to do more radical things with the game or with their next one. Which can only be good.

You don’t have to think through anything if you can alt tab and google. It might not be that way right now perhaps, but eventually this game will be just as documented as wowhead and other sites do for WoW and other games.

There is exactly zero difference between being able to alt-tab-and-google in TSW investigation mission, and alt-tab-and-google in a single-player game. ZERO. Since puzzle and mystery-solving games still exist, I’m going to go out on a limb and say “OMFG THE INTERNET EXISTS” isn’t really a valid argument against considering this kind of material in an MMO to be an innovation.

Now, to drop this in Notepad for the next 20 times someone makes the same dumb zombie argument.

Single player games tend to be fairly closed experiences, where going outside the game for information feels unnatural and to be avoided.

WoW, by contrast, positively requires it, or at least used to. “Buy a whatsit at silverwind refuge in ashenvale.” Where’s ashenvale? And where is silverwind refuge? Nothing in the game can answer the second question, and even the first is not readily apparent. There’s a steady patter of this stuff, and you just end up using web sites as part of the play experience.

The Secret World, somewhat different again, explicitly directs you to the internet repeatedly. Maybe this will allow it to keep the “augmented reality feel” but in the long run I really doubt it. You’ll google for information on something and find the answer instead, and not be motivated enough to SKIP PAST the answer to the clue.

There’s just something about the unavoidable clumsiness of MMO game and UI design that leads in this fully-spoiled direction.

Christ. Adding stuff that belongs in single player adventure games is not an evolution of the massively multiplayer online game genre. It’s a fucking regression from even the earliest MUDs.

The thing that companies should take away from the last few months in gaming history is this:

Online games that revolve around player interaction and player agency, like Day Z, are extraordinary and worth pursuing. Online games that try to stick static single player shit in them without improving actual gameplay (SWTOR, TSW; story is not gameplay) flop hard and game developers should steer clear.

In other words, let the players tell the story. Don’t try to tell a story to them.

If people actually take this shit on board and act like game designers instead of wannabe screenwriters masturbating about ~character~ and ~setting~ the MMO genre might have a fucking chance.

“It seems like only the jolt of many deaths will drive things forward.”
Quite the opposite, I’m afraid. Failure of this scale doesn’t encourage innovation in the game industry. Even without the string of MMO failures, innovation is a hard sell when this much money is at risk. Having been in the position of writing up justifications for a new MMO design, what the business guys in publishing want to hear is how this game will be just like a previous game that made a lot of money. Investors put money into a company because it’s working on a type of game with a proven financial track record. World of Warcraft got the money guys excited enough to pump a lot of money into MMOs for a time, but a string of failures has cooled their ardor now (that happened a while ago, really). We’re not going to see any new big MMOs at this point. Chinese and Korean companies have had some money to put into games, but they’re extremely conservative in terms of using familiar designs, so we’ll see more of the same from them. Otherwise we’re going to be seeing cheap, mostly web-based, online games. Those can take creative risks, but we won’t see it translated into a full MMO unless a few of those companies hit it big and rake in the sort of profits that make larger companies think they can make more money by making a AAA version of that game. (Which may never happen.)

After the shoddy job Funcom did with Age of Conan, and then pretty much announced they were jumping ship and working on Secret World when AoC was in its infancy, I hope it does go free to play. Can’t say I’m surprised they had to lay off half their staff. They don’t even properly finish an mmo before hopping into another one. They must be taking cues from Cryptic.

Given the situation, the possibility of delays on content updates is a high probability, obviously. So instead of mailing them or posting on their forums in typical whiner fashion, how about we just leave them alone to do their thing without heaping on extra BS for them to deal with at this critical juncture? Just a thought.

This is the first MMORG I’ve played properly since WOW, and I really enjoy it.

I bought a CD key online and paid around £22 IIRC for 30 days and game, then took 4 days to download the 35GB? it takes plus a couple of 5GB re-downloads of the same data due it’s mess ups.

After installing it I got the same auth failures the first adopters had weeks ago, then managed to get in to play.

The entire thing is grind and so far solo instances but it’s fun and the voice actors add a huge amount to the play, they are the stand out feature even if you like nothing else about it it’s the best i’ve heard in a game and it’s very wide spread.

So I’ll probably play for 30 days (minus the 6 or so it took me to get playing) and then renew for 30 days and then leave it for something else.

There isn’t many MMO’s that can hold their own in the “Memorable and Unique Gameplay Experience” since Blizzard dropped the IQ of the average online gamer down to half. Eve, TSW, and FFXI are all very good games that leave WoW in the dust. I’m not saying WoW players are stupid, but years of playing a game built to cater to those who would rather spend time rather than ability or skill (except for arenas but even that is heavily based on gear and time) has left them lazy. I have played terrible MMO’s before and i have to say most of them were free to play WoW clones where spoiled rich kids spend all day forcing their ego down the communities throat. It is because of stupid people like this that the F2P model is no longer appealing. Everyone is on the same level on a P2P game, even WoW with its many trolls at the end of the day has its moments of greatness because everybody stands up for themselves and gets their moneys worth without having to worry about the next immature wallet warrior sucking all the fun out of the game. The real issue here is with almost a decade of ‘WoW Clones” wasting paychecks and leaving players empty and increasingly irritated, nobody wants to take a real chance with TSW because they have been burned before AND THAT IS OK. But Ive been seeing a lot of complaints about the game that DO NOT EXIST. TSW is the next step in MMO gaming. The money your paying for monthly is for the quality of the game as well as the content and bug fixes. Voice acting for every npc, environmental effects, animations, story writing all take real people to sit down, brain storm, find voice actors, motion capture, storyboard, and test before it gets sent out as another update. For this quality of gaming to happen regularly while improving upon itself takes a great deal of money and no small effort to maintain. If TSW went F2P it would be a trainwreck bent to the will of WoW clone fanatics who will destroy TSW’s experience and existing fan base. TSW coaxed me into deleting WoW off my computer after 6 years of progression as well as every other MMO i had on my computer. It really is that damn good. Play TSW for a month, and i mean really play it and not just build your character like you would on every other MMO game and you will see what this game is really about.

It all hinges on the gameplay in the end. No matter how much effort and money you put into the voice acting, story, lore or other gimmicky shit. And the combat in this game is fucking terrible. These MMO developers need to realize that people are sick and tired of the same old button mashing grindfests. I knew that this would bomb the minute i logged into the closed beta and tried the gameplay out.

judging a game based on closed beta and open beta falls in line with being lazy. if you dont like something about the game, its beta, tell the damn developers to fix it, but dont sit there and act like you made any kind of contribution if you didnt share your opinion when it mattered. As for the combat being terrible, i just dont see it. The combat is fluid. its pretty much “here’s your toolbelt now go fix some shit in the face” and in no way is it boring. I agree that it can be improved but in no way is it horrid or a mashing grindfest. it is tactical, you cant just walk up on an opponent and expect a victory handed to you by button mashing and i think that pisses a lot of players off. Ive seen a lot of comments like yours and i wonder when it will be followed with what could be changed specifically instead of an unrealistic generalization that isnt based off the current mechanics. its just sad

When I started playing this I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. I played for a couple of weeks and then went away for 10 days and haven’t played since. It’s the quickest I’ve ever lost interest in a game I threw time at and I wasn’t sure what it was. The same happened with Tera, though it took a little longer because of the brilliant combat and fantastic graphics. Just started to play GW2 after only playing BWE1 and am enjoying it but I can’t help but wonder how long it’ll be before my interest drops off a cliff!
Work’s partly to blame. Summer means I’m away for up to 2 weeks at a time, and coming back to a mmo after even that short a spell requires an investment of time and mine is precious with so many awesome games to play. Oddly the thing I miss most about TSW is the inventory, good lord they nailed that!!!